Viktor Axelsen relocates to Dubai
Viktor Axelsen recently announced that he will be relocating to Dubai on his Facebook page. BadmintonEurope has an article as well: “Viktor Axelsen swaps Denmark for Dubai as his training base in huge move”.
He leaves the Danish National Training Centre, but will still compete for Denmark. He is going to live and train in Dubai. As reason for changing his training base he gives the easier travel to the tournaments in Asia and having allergy issues during the summer in Denmark. As BadmintonEurope quotes him:
It is deeply frustrating and inhibiting because I go 15-20 percent down in lung capacity when I am hardest hit. I’m not happy to take all that medicine, because I’m health conscious, but in Dubai I do not feel anything for the allergy at all.
He even pulled out of a tournament at least once due to allergy issues.
For me, the question arises, whether, if his allergies are such a problem to him, he performs not to his usual level during the summer, while outperforming during the allergy-free winter months. Of course this is just a very coarse analysis, because I’m just taking the months into account, disregarding, where matches were played and how the pollen situation actually is. And because Axelsen played almost all hist matches on the northern hemisphere, it’s safe to just use the months.
So we would expect Axelsen to perform worse during the summer (June, July) due to his allergies or the following months (August, September) due to poorer training during the summer. As my simulation doesn’t take seasons into account, this should lead to differences depending on the months. The following table shows all his matches since 2010 broken up by month. Each line contains the number of games he was expected by my simulation to win, the number of games he actually won, the total number of matches, and the differences in the number of matches as well as in standard deviations. For example, in January he was expected to win 55 matches, he actually won 57 out of his 71 matches.
| Month | Expected | Won | Matches | Diff | Dev |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | 457.56 | 451 | 595 | -6.560 | -0.78 |
| January | 54.999 | 57 | 71 | 2.001 | +0.66 |
| February | 63.112 | 60 | 71 | -3.112 | -1.45 |
| March | 59.582 | 62 | 77 | 2.418 | +0.77 |
| April | 65.199 | 61 | 77 | -4.199 | -1.56 |
| May | 31.599 | 33 | 42 | 1.401 | +0.59 |
| June | 11.059 | 10 | 20 | -1.059 | -0.56 |
| July | 8.635 | 9 | 10 | 0.365 | +0.37 |
| August | 20.650 | 23 | 28 | 2.350 | +1.25 |
| September | 38.980 | 35 | 51 | -3.980 | -1.60 |
| October | 53.204 | 51 | 73 | -2.204 | -0.72 |
| November | 32.855 | 30 | 47 | -2.855 | -1.13 |
| December | 17.685 | 20 | 28 | 2.315 | +1.02 |
No seasonal deviation is visible, all differences scatter randomly around zero. So either he was not as affected by the allergy, or he pulled out of tournaments when he was. The small number of matches during the summer is due to the small number of tournaments during that time.
So we will see if he can maintain his level without the training and the sparring with the Danish national team. There have been news that he will be joined by other top players, on his Instagram page Axelsen shared a video that was taken by Loh Kean Yew.
Maybe this is an indication of the weakening power of national associations, and towards more freer players, at least among the top players. Compared to tennis for example, national associations still have much greater power in badminton.